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The most »Jewish« among the biblical translations are the Targumim, because they were created within the Jewish communities as the companion to Hebrew Scripture within the milieu of rabbinic Judaism. The meaning of the word targum is »explanation«, »commentary«, and »translation«, and later, specifically, »translation into Aramaic.« The term »targum« does not refer to any type of translation, but to translations that involve exegetical elements, and it has been limited to Aramaic translations. These translations facilitated, in different degrees, the introduction of some or many exegetical elements including modernizations. Throughout the centuries, the Aramaic Targumim retained a more special status within the Jewish communities than all other translations because of their close relation to the rabbinic interpretation of Scripture. The medieval commentators often quoted from them, and they were printed in full in the Rabbinic Bibles alongside the Hebrew text. Targumim were made of each of the canonical books of the Bible (excluding Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel), sometimes more than one.

Some of the Targumim were originally created orally and were committed to writing only at a later stage. From the outset, it seems surprising that Aramaic translations were made at all, since this language is so close to Hebrew. The usual explanation given is that the knowledge of Hebrew began to wane during the Second Temple period, at which point it was replaced by Aramaic, the vernacular language.

It is not clear when the first Targumim were produced (tradition ascribes the first Targum to Ezra in the fifth century BCE). Manuscript evidence is early, as the Targum fragments found at Qumran are ascribed to the 2^nd–1^st centuries BCE (4QtgLev = 4Q156) and the 1^st century CE (4QtgJob = 4Q157 and 11QtgJob). Some Targumim are free translations, while others are literal, and it is often assumed that the freer Targumim are earlier. At the same time, the literary crystallizations of these Targumim may point in a different direction: The Palestinian Targumim of the Torah are more free than the earlier Targum Onqelos. Some Targumim contain even elements deriving from the European culture of the 10^th century.⁷⁵

Text-critical value. The analyses of the translation character of all the Targumim focus on exegetical differences between the Targumim and MT, while the number of the variants reconstructed from the Targumim is extremely small and their reconstruction is not stable. For example, the 650 minor differences between MT and Targum Onqelos listed by Sperber⁷⁶ are culled from different manuscripts of that Targum, so that their textual basis is uncertain. Many of them reflect contextual harmonizations and changes. For Targum Jonathan, Sperber provided even fewer examples. All the Targumim thus reflect the medieval form of MT (for 11QtgJob, see below).

The early Qumran Targum 11QtgJob deviates slightly from all other textual witnesses of the book. Since the Qumran fragments provide the earliest evidence of any Targum, possibly the other Targumim also once deviated more from MT, but were subsequently adapted towards its text. Alternatively, the milieu that created 11QtgJob (not the Qumran community) followed different approaches from those taken in the milieu in which the other Targumim were created.